Paper Chess
by DuckofIndeed
Summary: Ever wonder what Gol and Maia did to keep themselves occupied all those centuries spent trapped in the Dark Eco silo?


A fellow "Jak and Daxter" fan gave me this idea (she changes her name sometimes, so I feel it would be best to simply give you her permanent FF ID so you can forever find who she is: 5046395) when she came up with the idea of Gol and Maia playing Go Fish during their centuries trapped in the silos. And that's what inspired this idea I share with you all below. I hope you enjoy, and as always, the characters and whatever else are property of Naughty Dog, who stubbornly refuse to give us more "Jak" games, which makes me rather cross at them.

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><p><strong>Paper Chess<strong>

Maia was bored. And by bored, she meant really quite terribly bored. Bored to the point of pulling out her hair bored or settling for watching her nails grow just for the fun of it bored. Bored enough that the kinds of things her brother managed to enjoy might actually not look so bad anymore, that's how bored she was.

But, two or three centuries spent trapped in a hot, cramped Precursor robot head did that to a person.

She was currently sitting on the floor, just as she had been for the last six hours, with her arms crossed just as they had been for the last two, watching Gol poke and prod at the wiring he had exposed in the robot's control panel as he sought some way of getting them out of this fine mess they (he) had created, just as he had been for the last years uncounted.

And she really didn't think she could take it much longer. Or else she might be very bald, very soon. He, too, perhaps, if she could get her hands on him. He could move fast when he really wanted to.

"Dear brother," she began, and he sighed before she had even gotten a chance to speak further. This wasn't the first time they had done this.

"Yes, dear sister…"

"Would you take your eyes off that stupid control panel for five seconds and look at me when I talk to you?"

Gol's head drooped, but he did as he was told. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm currently in the middle of something I think will greatly benefit you once it's complete, but what is it that you need _this_ time?"

She arched her eyebrows at him. "We _have_ to find some way to occupy our time. I simply can't take another second of this monotony without _screaming_."

Her brother turned away again to focus on wires that, frankly, weren't going anywhere. "Then entertain yourself, if you're so bored. I'm busy. And if you really must scream, I ask that you at least keep the volume to a minimum."

Maia was on her feet at once with her fists clenched at her sides, while her brother turned an unimpressed eye on her. "What did I say about ignoring me? You've done nothing but tighten this and rearrange that ever since we got trapped in this horrible place! And since it's all your fault, the least you could—"

"_My_ fault?" This was enough to get his attention, and he stepped towards her, a hand to his chest. "How is this _my_ fault? If anything, _you're_ the one who decided to distract me by yelling in my ear throughout that whole ordeal with the boy and his orange rodent—"

"Don't remind me."

"—so don't blame _me_ when _you_ refused to do anything but hover behind me and be a pest! If you're so bored, _dear_ sister, why don't you help me, regardless of whether or not your belief is true that all misfortune in the universe can be traced back to me!" Gol's tirade was cut short when he was forced to gasp for breath, fortunate for him, as before long, his sister was considering ignoring his request to keep her volume down, and she could yell so much louder than he could.

"If I was stuck staring at sparking wires all day, I'd _really_ be tempted to kill myself. Dear brother. There must be something else we can do. _You're_ the genius. Think of something."

"It was…your idea…." Gol said, though he remained doubled over, even now, with a hand clutched to his chest. His wheezing really did get on her nerves sometimes.

"Fine, then, but you can't complain if you don't like my ideas." Maia crossed her arms. And she thought. Quite long and quite hard, or at least, as long and as hard as she was in the mood for, and she wasn't much in the mood at all.

"Well, what do you have?" her brother asked.

"I'm still thinking!" Well, they had already done plenty of talking, and she had since heard enough of his raspy voice to tide her over for a lifetime. Plus, talking about what they planned on doing once, _if_, they were ever free was as much torture as being trapped in here to begin with. "Is there anything _to_ do?"

"You could help me."

"Besides that!"

"There are the same options now as there were _years_ ago!" Gol said, before he was reduced to a fit of hacking.

She watched and waited for this newest display of weakness and infirmity to run its course, and when he seemed again to be in a proper state for answering her, she asked, "Well, what do we _have_?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Why don't you _look_?"

Maia huffed, and she swung her arms much more than she needed to as she marched by him to inspect the various compartments of the robot's control panel, but all she could find were tools, spare parts (little good _those_ did them), and notes and diagrams on now very old parchment. These she took out, a few slipping loose and drifting to the floor, and she raised the yellowing pages at him.

"Is there anything we can do with _these_?"

Gol shook his head and shrugged all at once. She had to do _everything_ around here.

He watched as she strode by and slipped down to sit in the middle of the floor before splitting the pages up to hold in both hands, and this time, her brother made no move to interrupt as she stared between them.

"Chess," she said at last.

"Pardon?" Gol said, and she gazed up at him.

"You enjoy that silly game, don't you? Don't tell me you're going to argue now that I've come up with an idea you should actually like."

He scratched the side of his chin. "You seem to have misunderstood me. _How_ do you plan on playing chess when we have absolutely no pieces for it?"

"We'll _make_ them.

He frowned at her. "I see."

"No, really. They don't have to look like the pieces as long as we can tell them apart. Look…" She set all the pages in her lap, save one, and began to tear it up, all the while ignoring her brother's protests against such unwarranted destruction, before holding up a jagged square. "The squares can be those little, waste-of-time pieces…"

"The pawns, you mean?"

"…and the rectangles can be those thin ones that move diagonally."

"Bishops."

"Like _that's_ a thing. And…well, the crumpled balls can be the horses you always say I move wrong."

"The _knights_, dear sister. They're called _knights_, not horses."

Maia rolled her eyes. "Whatever. I never see any actual people on them, so they're _horses_. Do you understand now?"

"Oh, yes, I understand _perfectly_," Gol said. "And why don't we fold some of them into paper cranes, and those can be the castles?"

She leered at him. "I don't see you coming up with any _better_ ideas. In fact, I don't see you coming up with any ideas at all."

"Except possibly helping me to get out of this place. Not that _that's_ important or anything."

"Just sit down already."

"You know how sitting on the floor aggravates my back—"

"Just sit."

Her brother joined her, wincing, on the floor, as she continued to fold her makeshift chess pieces, while he merely looked on, and though she couldn't read his thoughts, she still didn't particularly like them.

"How do we make the board, dear sister?" he said.

"Use your imagination."

"And how, in your divine wisdom, do you propose we do _that_?"

"Just shut up."

But, he didn't. "And how will we tell the two sides apart? I think using our imagination will cause some confusion in _that_ area, as well, as if this whole idea wasn't _already_ far too complicated to be practical."

At this, Maia paused in her work. "You know what, we're currently stuck together in a very small space, where absolutely _no one_ can hear you, mind you, so I don't think you want to make me angry right now."

They settled for a grid of paper squares, which were often mistaken for actual playing pieces, while Maia got the larger pieces of paper, and he got the smaller, which _also_ weren't as easy to tell apart as previously planned. And to add to the confusion, sometimes pieces would transform into other pieces when they failed to practice a gentle hand. And on more than one occasion, they both announced checkmate on pawns or horses (knights, whatever) rather than actual kings, and once, Gol failed to take notice of the time he had actually been _correct_ in his declaration of checkmate, and she had claimed otherwise.

And yet, despite the absurdity of their situation, he still insisted on following the rules, even when they were supposed to be having _fun_. The crumpled balls absolutely _had_ to go in a ridiculous L pattern, while he forbid her from moving the triangle that was the king more than one space at a time, even when it made it that much harder for it to get out of the way of whatever pieces the squares folded in half and made into tents were meant to be. Then again, she couldn't even be certain if the pieces she was avoiding were his or, in actuality, her own.

They kept at this nonsense for a good two hours before the squares of the makeshift board and the pieces themselves had become jumbled beyond comprehension, and there were now far more pawns than there had any right being, and her rhombus was cornered, and she no longer remembered whether or not it was even a piece worth fighting for. Or was it simply a misshapen square? Those were only the useless ones, right?

"Can't you just bend the stupid rules a teeny, tiny bit and let me move it where I need to?" Maia asked after they had wasted the last fifteen minutes in a pointless dance about the board involving his crumpled ball and a rectangle pursuing her rhombus, unless it was really, in fact, a square, and she adjusted her position on the floor for quite possibly the twentieth time since the game began. "You're going to win in the end anyway, so would it really hurt you to show me a little mercy?"

"_You're_ the one who insisted we play this ridiculous game of paper chess, and if we're stuck doing this, the least we can do is do it right." Gol rubbed at an aching back, but he didn't get up and take the short walk he claimed he so desperately needed because she would, and _had_, rearranged the board when he wasn't looking. He gestured to her cornered rhombus. "Whatever that thing is, it certainly doesn't move in any of the ways _you've_ tried. So just move it in an actually legitimate way already or give it up. It's not an important piece anyway, to my recollection."

"I really think it is."

"Just move it."

"Not until you quit being stubborn and let me move it where I darn well _want_ to move it."

"Games have rules for a reason, dear sister. Your pieces can't just magically teleport across the board just because you want them to."

"It's _my_ game, and I can—" She pounded a fist on the floor, only to send several pieces nearest her flying across the "board". "Oh, for Precursors' sake!"

Gol sprung to his feet, displaying a degree of limberness he had not possessed in a very long time. "That's it, I'm done! And I seriously care little to think about all the time we just wasted, time that could've been better spent on something actually productive! You can help, or don't, but I never want to see another piece of paper again for as long as we're stuck in this infuriating place, which, as far as I can surmise, is going to be for the rest of our unnaturally long, miserable lives!" He began to stomp back in the direction of the control panel, an act that lost some of its effectiveness when he had bare feet, only to pause and half turn back to her. "And watch your language, dear sister."

"Bite me, dear brother."

He had the nerve to give her, what she was quite certain was, the evil eye before returning to his work, and she let out a snarl as she struck the floor once more with her fist. "Would you give it up already! This thing is going nowhere! It's a dismembered robot head! You've been messing around with it for years, _decades_! If it was going to do something, it would have done it already!"

Gol turned back to face her one, final time. "Would you rather we return to playing chess?"

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><p>It's kind of a weird, ridiculous idea, I know, but that's the point, really. Gol and Maia had to find <em>some<em> way of keeping busy in the silo, so this could have very well been just one way of doing that. You never know…. And believe it or not (why wouldn't you?), this isn't so very different from what a friend and I once did when we decided to try playing a very similar game over the phone.

It did not work.

Anyway, please review.


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